History of the Jews in Greater Cleveland
The Jewish community of the Greater Cleveland area comprises a significant ethnoreligious population of the U.S. State of Ohio.
In the early 21st century, Ohio's census data reported over 150,000 Jews, with the Cleveland area being home to more than 50% of this population.
[3] Over the next few years, Cleveland saw a rapid influx of Jews particularly within the city’s Orthodox Jewish and corporate business communities.
Cleveland’s Orthodox community saw rapid growth based on an influx of Jews fleeing worsening conditions and rising antisemitism in New York, New Jersey, as well as from Europe.
Lower real estate prices than in East Coast major cities also attracted many Jewish people to Cleveland.
From the late 1800s and well into the 1950s, the vast majority of Jews lived in the inner city neighborhoods of Glenville, Kinsman, and Hough.
There were dozens of synagogues spread throughout these neighborhoods, which were diverse in terms of wealth based class of Cleveland Jews.
[3] Many young Jewish business professionals live downtown and on the west side in neighbors such as Lakewood and Tremont.
Like many other cities in the United States, Cleveland has seen several demographic shifts persist among various neighborhoods since the beginning of its foundation.
The argument eventually turned into an Ohio Supreme Court case, which ruled that the synagogue must be allowed to be built on its current site in Beachwood.
[13] The large synagogue prompted congregants, mainly hundreds of Jewish families, to move to Beachwood.
The Telshe Yeshiva, a rabbinical college relocated from Lithuania to the Greater Cleveland area in 1941 during the Holocaust, has a main campus in Wickliffe.
[21] There are several Jewish youth group chapters in Greater Cleveland, including BBYO, USY, NCSY, and NFTY.
The Ohio Northern Region, based in Cleveland but also branched in Akron/Canton, Toledo, and Youngstown, have 17 different AZA and BBG Chapters.
Since 1907, Camp Wise has been the summer home to hundreds of Jewish kids and teens from grades 2-10 every year.
It is estimated that 10,000–15,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union reside in Greater Cleveland, most of whom live in Mayfield Heights, Solon, Beachwood, and Orange.
The majority of Cleveland’s Soviet Jews arrived from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Uzbekistan.
[28] Though Soviet-Jews typically started off poor in the U.S., many rapidly grew into the upper middle class within a matter of a few years.
This particularly unusual case of immigrants becoming so rapidly successful is contributed to a mix of progressive Soviet education and former employment concentrated around the fields of science, engineering, doctoring, and literature, as well as with the help of the Cleveland Jewish Community with essentials such as childcare, employment finding, English classes at Cuyahoga Community College, and financial assistance with rent and housing.
[29] Because the majority of Soviet-Jewish immigrants in the 1980s–2000s were young couples, thousands of new Russian-Jewish families were started in Cleveland, and bilingual English-and Russian-speaking children are currently raised in the area.
[citation needed] The influx of Soviet-Jewish immigrants also brought a new wave of Yiddish speakers to Greater Cleveland, an almost reverse effect than that of Jewish communities in the rest of the U.S. Yiddish is the second dominant language of Soviet Jews after Russian, especially for Jews coming from shtetls and cities with large historic Jewish populations in Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova.
Also, because of the extensive advertising for local Russian businesses, all newspapers are free and are issued to whoever orders a subscription.
Following a severe winter storm on March 8, 2018, a part of the eruv connected to a power line was downed, the first time in over 33 years for this to happen.
